Irish Catholics riot after Protestant group's march

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Irish Catholic militants attacked riot police Thursday in a polarized corner of Belfast as the most divisive day on Northern Ireland's calendar reached a typically ugly end — and yet managed, amid the smoke and chaos, to break some new ground for peacemaking.

Several hours of violence in the hard-line Catholic Ardoyne district marked the fourth straight year that the area has descended into street battles following the annual passage of Protestant marchers from the Orange Order brotherhood.

Massive Orange parades across Northern Ireland each July 12 — an official holiday that commemorates the Protestant side's victory in 17th-century religious warfare — often stoke conflict with Catholics, who despise the annual marches as a Protestant show of superiority.

But in recent years, as British authorities have restricted the Protestants' march routes, a drab stretch of road that passes a row of Ardoyne shops has become the focal point for province-wide animosity. There, the decades-old battle for supremacy between the British Protestant majority and Irish Catholic minority wages a yearly test of wills, with heavily armored police stuck in the middle.

A British government-appointed Parades Commission sought to defuse the Ardoyne conflict this year by ordering the Orangemen to march along Crumlin Road by 4 p.m., three hours sooner than normal.

Protestant leaders grudgingly accepted the deadline rather than mount a later standoff, and all the sides agreed this gesture kept a bad situation from turning even worse.

The Parades Commission and police also permitted Ardoyne residents for the first time to stage their own march on the road a few hours later in a bid to balance competing rights. That second gesture was overshadowed by violence.

The police commander directing the operation to keep the riots confined to a few Ardoyne residential streets, Assistant Chief Constable Will Kerr, praised “the positive efforts of all those parading, protesting and marshaling today.”

Kerr said four officers were wounded, but none had life-threatening injuries. He said police fired at least one plastic bullet, a snub-nosed cylinder designed to knock down the target without penetrating the flesh, in response to rioters' sporadic use of Molotov cocktails.